Art in Review

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: July 13, 2007

It says something about the phlegmatic pulse of current art that one of the few striking sights in Chelsea so far this summer is a show of mostly seen-before sculpture made more than three decades ago by two artists in the exhibiting gallery's stable. Louise Bourgeois and Lynda Benglis were born 30 years apart. But for a short while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they were producing radical and complementary work.

At the time, Post-Minimalism -- more accurately, counter-Minimalism -- was being advertised as the latest defining style. The name was really a blanket label for various forms of art that had internalized and been shaped by the mold-breaking liberationist energies of the 1960s. And no energy was more forceful than that generated by the women's movement, which was coming to a boil during the time most of the work in the show was being made.

By 1970, however, Ms. Bourgeois was already a one-woman vanguard, having developed, decades earlier, a radically gendered art, body-based, autobiographically inflected. Well in advance of Minimalism she created its opposite: an expressive, metaphor-rich, mock-organic, reverse-monumental abstract sculpture. Few people knew of it, though.

Museums ignored Ms. Bourgeois. In his 20 years as a critic, the Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, who prided himself on his adventurous eye, didn't mention her once, though her fleshy, sexually mocking work was at least as challenging of art- establishment codes and conventions as his own.

Such challenges were a prime stimulus for Ms. Benglis's cast- metal sculptures from the same period. Several bear a family resemblance to Ms. Bourgeois's. But as the art historian Robert Pincus-Witten suggests in an exhibition essay, they were very different.

Ms. Bourgeois's art was fundamentally private, the subconscious its source; Ms. Benglis's work was brashly extroverted, a sardonic and competitive response to other contemporary art.

In 1968 Richard Serra pinned a sheet of lead to the wall with a pole, defying gravity and earning a round of heavyweight applause. In 1969 Ms. Benglis piled thick, blubbery, gravity-endorsing slabs of the same material on a gallery floor without raising a critical stir. That would come a few years later, in 1974, when she bought advertising space in Artforum and filled it with a photograph of herself, nude, buff, wearing cool shades and holding a dildo between her legs.

The result was a succ?de scandale that touched a raw feminist nerve, threw inveterately sleazy art-world politics into relief, and caused permanent editorial rifts at Artforum itself. It's impossible to imagine such passion being roused over anything in Chelsea today, though at least a spark of it lingers in this historical sizzler of a summer show. HOLLAND COTTER

Jim Isermann's goal, it would seem, is to break down the boundary between fine art and design. This cheerful miniretrospective of his die-cut vinyl decals (the gallery's four walls are covered with them, floor to ceiling) updates Op Art aesthetics in a way that seems in step with the art world's current cash-and-carry moment.

The gallery's north wall is papered with ''Untitled (P.S. I Love You),'' a large Mylar piece from 1999 that was originally conceived for the Portikus museum in Frankfurt. Mr. Isermann has emblazoned the aluminum-foil-like material with white dots that begin as skinny vertical lozenges, grow into perfect spheres and then dissolve back into the original form. The effect conjures Bridget Riley's optics or the glamour of Andy Warhol's balloons.

The other decals are reflected in the Mylar's shiny veneer. They combine punchy colors (electric yellow, poppy red, lollipop orange, Emerald City green, Violet Beauregarde violet and royal blue) with bold graphic patterns. One is covered by a string of large paper-clip-like forms that have the graphic punch of the Rolling Stones' lips logo. Another evokes inner-city traffic patterns or computer-chip circuits. All seem designed to make you dizzy.

Unlike Mr. Isermann's sculptural installations, for instance, the wavy wall of white waffle-like polystyrene from his last show, these decals don't create a sense of their own architecture. They land squarely in the decorative realm as opposed to the artistic. I couldn't help thinking that they would look fantastic in the entryway of an advertising agency. BRIDGET L. GOODBODY

Drawing has achieved near-fetish status as a vehicle for studying an artist's process. But with Milton Avery (1885-1965), watercolors work just as well.

The watercolors here span more than 30 years and dip into genres from landscape, seascape and cityscape to portraiture, still life and abstraction. They also reveal Avery's resistance to fully adopting or rejecting abstraction during its mid-20th-century heyday while at the same time trying, as he once said, to ''eliminate and simplify, leaving apparently nothing but color and form.''